About Historians

A Siena poll of academic historians rating the presidents reminds me of why I don’t trust historians . . . and why you shouldn’t either. In it, Obama is ranked the 15th best president . . . three spots ahead of Ronald Reagan.

Yes, utterly absurd, to put it charitably. (And apologies if you spewed coffee on your keyboard.)

This sort of ideological bias among historians is nothing new. I remember seeing such rankings of presidents as a child. And even then, I thought they were rubbish. (Yes, I was slightly precocious. And the bias among historians is that obvious.)

Let’s look at another area. All my life I have seen numerous documentaries on the atrocities of the Nazis. And that is as it should be. It is important that we never forget the lessons of that dark time.

It is now over twenty years after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Where, pray tell, are all the documentaries on the atrocities of Communism? For that matter, where are all the documentaries on the atrocities of Stalin and the Bolsheviks before him? They murdered far more people than Hitler. Why do we see and hear so little about that?

Such bias is disturbing; for how we think of the past will effect how we act in the future. If we are ignorant of the predations of the Left, we are more likely to fall for them again. If we are ignorant of the principles behind the founding of our nation (And such ignorance is practically encouraged in our public schools.), we will be less likely to defend them. And no telling what will be the result of such idiocy as considering Obama a better president than Reagan. (And that idiocy is more widespread than you might think.)

In short, history is too important to entrust to academic historians.

And academic historians, as a group, have again and again shown themselves to unworthy of trust.